Indium

Featuring 99.99% Indium and Indium-Based Low Melting Alloys

Indium was discovered by the German chemists Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymus Richter in 1863. Reich and Richter had been looking for traces of the element thallium in samples of Zinc order, when they saw a brilliant indigo line in the sample’s spectrum which revealed the existence of Indium. Indium is about as abundant as silver but is much easier to recover since it typically occurs along with Zinc, Iron, Lead, and Copper ores.

Indium has a wide range of uses: as a thin alloy layer in high performance bearings, in the electronics industry it has been widely used to manufacture flat screen televisions. It is used as a component of transistors and in computer equipment; in low melting point alloys and in solders. Some of these low melting point alloys are used for glass lens grinding and polishing, and as plugs for fire sprinkler systems. Indium is also used as catalysts and in the purification for the manufacture of certain organic chemical products, particularly man-made fibers. The metal also has many minor uses in research and laboratory techniques.